Millennium Meltdown

With so much riding on it, how can small-business owners minimize the impact of the Y2K bug on their enterprise? Triage-determining which systems are the most important to the health of the business and attending to those first-is a good way to start, says Gold-farb. If your business relies on desktop PCs, there's a simple test you can perform to check the Y2K compliance of your systems. First, back up all your files on disk or tape. Then manually reset each PC's clock to 11:59 on December 31, 1999. If, after a minute has passed, the clock reads anything other than 12:00 a.m. on January 1, 2000, your PC is vulnerable to the Y2K bug. If it passes the test, try again-but this time shut off the power after manually resetting the time. Wait a minute, reboot, and then check the time and date again. If there are errors in the time and date display, the PC's BIOS (basic input/output system) needs to be replaced or fixed with a software patch.

Software installed on your machines can also cause major problems, says Ed Yourdon, co-author of Time Bomb 2000 (Prentice Hall Computer Books), particularly if they are "orphan" applications. "The biggest risk for PCs is that they may be using home-grown software or some proprietary billing package that was developed five years ago by someone who has since disappeared," says Yourdon. "You could very well have Y2K problems with that application."

If you use many different types of software, it may be difficult to keep track of compliance issues. Grover suggests performing an inventory of your software and then going down the list and contacting vendors to see if their products require upgrades or patches of some type to be Y2K-com-pliant. Most software vendors post this in-form-ation on their Web sites. Software produced by vendors who can't or won't offer you a reasonable solution should be replaced immediately.

This article was originally published in the January 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Millennium Meltdown.